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Tansy Rayner Roberts

Friday Links: This Week Fortnightly

June 21st, 2013 at 7:45

I wasn’t here last week! So here are two weeks worth of links. Deep breath, we’re going in.

The outrageous hoax (well, it has to be) that 90 missing episodes of Doctor Who have been found safe and well somewhere in Africa continues to keep Doctor Who fans from clawing each other’s eyes out over who will succeed Matt Smith, which is… good, right? No link to this one, because I first heard it from a bloke in a bar (hi Mondy!) If it’s true obviously it would blow everyone’s minds, but the potential for heartbreak is too high to give it a moment’s attention. Moving on…

Justine Larbalestier, whose PhD makes her eminently qualified to make this statement, comes in with We Have Always Been Fighting This Fight, about the women who have been part of science fiction and fandom since the beginning, and yet have always been announced as if they are unusual, or the first to make themselves seen.

Speaking of which, Anita Sarkeesian got some charming responses when she tweeted a response to the fact that none of the games presented at Microsoft’s Xbox One E3 press conference featured female protagonists.

4 Responses to “Friday Links: This Week Fortnightly”

The missing stories rumour has been bizarre. First it looked false, then true, then false, then the BBC muddied the waters by releasing a statement that didn’t say “there are no missing stories coming in” but rather “we can not confirm that any missing stories are coming in”, which just sounds ambivalent and maddeningly vague.

Personally I don’t think there *are* a raft of rediscovered episodes about to be announced, but I wish the BBC would manage expectations a little better.

I mean, if you were GOING to pull an elaborate hoax on all Doctor Who fans, this would totally be the one to pull. Apparently it has been ticking away under the surface in fandom for a couple of years, so it’s a long game if someone is doing it to deliberately screw with people.